The following list of fundamental human rights is taken from Jack Donnelly‘s book International Human Rights, 2007 p. 7.This compilation of fundamental rights is based on the key articles and substance of the three documents that make up what has become known as the International Bill of Human Rights. Namely, these are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). While the UDHR is not exclusively a legal document, many law scholars, activists, and practitioners have argued that it has, through practice and general acceptance, entered into customary international law. Meanwhile, the two International Covenants are international legal documents. They were both adopted by the United Nation’s General Assembly on 16 December 1966. The ICESCR achieved enough ratifications and entered into force on 3 January 1976 and the ICCPR on 23 March 1976. Since the ratification of these two treaties a number of additional international human rights instruments that greatly expand on the rights here enumerated have entered into force.

1976 also inaugurated the Human Rights Committee, charged with reviewing state implementation of the ICCPR and hearing complaints and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, charged with the same task for the ICESCR. As noted in an earlier post, a number of states parties to both conventions have either put forth reservations stripping these monitoring bodies of jurisdiction to specific countries or failed to ratify accompanying optional protocols that allow for independent complaint mechanisms. Aside from these monitoring bodies, known as Treaty bodies because their existence is tied to specific human rights treaties, the United Nations Human Rights Council is the principal body charged with monitoring human rights among the 193 member states of the United Nations. The Human Rights Council shall be composed of 47 member countries, chosen with set distribution from certain regions around the world. It has come under significant criticism from a number of sources for bias or hypocrisy. For example, the Philippines is a current member despite censure by the Committee to Protect Journalists that the Philippines is the second most dangerous place for press freedom advocates and journalists after Iraq and the fact that China has served, and is up for election in November.

In light of such contradictions and concerns amid declarations of humanitarian and international human rights conditions as a pretext for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), for example, a deeper understanding of the specific human rights guaranteed by international law is of paramount necessity. If the international order, composed of states most often acting in pursuit of their own interests, is to be taken seriously, far greater promotion and protection of human rights is needed. For regimes such as the United States in their support of R2P or China in their support for non-interference, both countries eliciting respect for international law, to be taken seriously their own domestic and international records have a convenient litmus by which to measure actual commitment against the rhetoric of political or economic expediency.

Donnelly succinctly outlines the following principle human rights by which we may measure state’s commitment to international law and fundamental human rights (UDHR=D; ICESCR=E; ICCPR=C):